Look for the good before we seek anger

Globalization and the Internet allow us to be more connected to the world than ever before.

We can know the details of tragedies and triumphs that never touch our personal lives thanks to blogs, videos and news sources.

Being connected to so many other people and the events that take place at both a national and individual scale allows us to experience a greater flux of emotions: more sadness, more laughter,more anger.

But maybe anger is becoming too much of a default emotion for us.

You would think that consistently running on such high emotions would be exhausting, but we somehow manage.

One of my friends wrote a blog post recently about her father and fatherhood.

I complimented her when I saw her, and she shared that not many people read the post.

She said her posts were more popular when she ranted and spent less time on them, but the posts treating subjects she deeply cared about and took time on received little attention.

It’s interesting that the sensational draws in more readers to her blog, while reflection on the beauties of everyday life doesn’t seem to be as interesting to some people.

How often do we react with anger before all else?

It would be naive of me to think that this is somehow new to our generation.

We are not alone in being drawn to the sensational.

But it doesn’t seem wise to be drawn to information simply because someone is angry about something, I am not sure how often we click on level-headed arguments that we don’t already agree with.

Instead of offering and enacting real solutions, anger can lead to bitterness about what is not working exactly the way we would hope in our social circles, government and world.

It can get in the way of our being able to celebrate good things when they happen.

Some people might be tempted to scoff and mumble “finally” under their breath and find a detail to be angry about instead of allowing positive changes to lift their spirits and build hope for the future.

One solution might be to learn how to celebrate the small pieces of good that we and our opposition agree on.

If we are angry, we are not always in a state of mind to put the changes we are hoping to see into action.

We vent our frustration on blogs and social media about what we think is right and wrong, and that is not a bad thing in and of itself.

But if we do not allow all of these feelings to motivate us to action in the physical world, then maybe we risk all of these emotions and hours spent arguing amounting to nothing.

Even if we see no need to quantify our success by the amount of change we have made to the world, maybe we need to at least want to see growth and increased depth in ourselves.

Rather than feeding the fury over being jilted in small and large ways, let’s look at the good in each other and come up with ways to get it a little more right the next time.

Let’s embrace goodness and be wary of people who want to incite us to anger.